1.2 The Five-Competency Blueprint & How to Study It

1.2 The Five-Competency Blueprint & How to Study It

Florida publishes a Competencies and Skills document for every FTCE test. For Middle Grades Mathematics 5–9 it lists five competencies, each with an approximate percentage of the total test, and under each competency a numbered list of specific skills. Those numbered skills are the real specification: an item writer must trace every question back to one of them.

The five competencies and their weights

Two observations drive everything else. First, algebra alone is 30% — double the weight of number sense and equal to geometry plus half of data. Second, the four mathematics-content competencies together are 80%, so this is overwhelmingly a content examination with one substantial pedagogy strand rather than a teaching-methods test with some mathematics attached.

The blueprint change you must not miss

Florida redeveloped test 025. The earlier outline had ten competencies — problem solving and reasoning, manipulatives and instructional technology, assessment, connections among concepts, number sense, foundations of algebra, algebraic thinking, data, two-dimensional geometry, and measurement and spatial sense — and it is explicitly marked "For Testing until 12/31/2023." It is retired.

What structurally changed:

• Pedagogy consolidated and shrank. Four separate teaching competencies (problem solving, manipulatives/technology, assessment, connections) totalling 35% became a single 20% competency, Student reasoning and instructional practice.
• Measurement disappeared as a competency. Unit conversion moved into Competency 1 skill 6 alongside ratios and proportions. Perimeter, circumference, area, surface area, and volume moved into Competency 3 skill 4.
• Algebra grew sharply. The old foundations of algebra (14%) plus algebraic thinking (11%) totalled 25%; the single algebra competency is now 30%, and its skill list explicitly adds quadratic key features, quadratic solution methods, exponential growth and decay models, and transformations of function formulas.
• Data and probability nearly doubled, from 7% to 15%, gaining population estimation from surveys and fitting linear functions to bivariate data.
• Trigonometric ratios were dropped. The retired outline tested right-triangle trigonometry; the current geometry competency does not list it. Circles, by contrast, were sharpened into a specific skill about center, radius, and the equation of a circle.

Turning weights into a study plan

Allocate study hours in proportion to weight, then adjust upward for personal weakness. Over a 60-hour plan:

1. Algebra — 18 hours. Linear work, quadratics in all three solution methods, exponential models, function families, transformations, and systems.
2. Geometry — 12 hours. Formula memorization first, then angle reasoning, congruence and similarity criteria, coordinate geometry, and circles.
3. Student reasoning and instructional practice — 12 hours. These items are scenario-based and read quickly, but they hinge on vocabulary you must actually know: learning progressions, the concrete–representational–abstract sequence, formative versus summative use of data, and misconception diagnosis.
4. Number sense — 9 hours. Rational number conversion, order of operations, factors, radicals and rational exponents, scientific notation, and proportional reasoning.
5. Data and probability — 9 hours. Center and spread, displays, distribution shape, sampling and population estimates, correlation, and theoretical versus experimental probability.

How the competencies interact on real items

Competency 5 items are not free-standing pedagogy. Most of them embed a mathematics task and then ask a teaching question about it — which representation to select, what a student's error reveals, what the next instructional move should be. That means weak content knowledge depresses your Competency 5 score too. A candidate who cannot see why a student wrote (a + b)² = a² + b² cannot choose the right remediation.

The reverse also holds. Content items are frequently dressed in classroom language: a stem may describe a teacher planning a lesson on scale factor and then ask a pure Competency 3 similarity question. Do not let the classroom framing distract you from the mathematics being requested.

A checklist for judging any prep resource

• Does it name five competencies, not ten?
• Does it weight algebra at 30%?
• Does it teach the equation of a circle, completing the square, exponential decay, population estimation from a survey, and learning progressions? All five are current skills that the retired outline did not name.
• Does it avoid promising a specific raw percentage for passing?

If a resource fails these checks, it is teaching a test Florida stopped giving after 2023.